Falcon (Kindred, #5)

FIVE

FIVE

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Bess had put a small nail file and tweezer set in the bathroom with the other supplies she’d left. Devon had finished plucking her eyebrows and was giving herself a manicure when there was a tap on the ajar bathroom door. Whirling around, Bess was there with a pile of clothes in her hands.

“Would you like to get dressed?”

Devon wouldn’t say no to that offer. Wearing anything but this shapeless nightgown would be an improvement. Bess came over and laid the clothes on the vanity. “Come into the bedroom when you’re ready, dearie.”

Bess went out allowing Devon to see what clothes were there. New underwear with the tags on was a relief, so she quickly put that on then looked at the other choices. There were two dresses to choose from, a blue one or a purple. Devon doubted she would want to ever wear blue again, so she chose the purple. It was long sleeved with a scoop neck, but the loose skirt went to her knee and didn’t disturb any of her wound dressings.

Being in new, clean clothes gave her a surprising boost of energy. This day had revived her; she felt like a new woman. Since her conversation with the stranger last night, her burden had lightened and she could feel pride in herself for standing her ground and achieving something.

Departing the bathroom, Devon was going to ask for some books or some paper, because if she was going to be stuck in this room, she’d need more to entertain her than pacing between the walls. But she didn’t get the chance to open her mouth. To her surprise, the door to the hallway was open. Beyond her room was a wide corridor with a hardwood floor and a red carpet runner.

Bess stood at the end of the bed and gestured to the open door. “Would you like to eat lunch with us?”

Devon didn’t have a clue what to say. More must have happened last night than she realized, somehow in those few minutes of conversation, she’d made a breakthrough. “I can leave?”

“Come with me,” Bess said.

Linking arms, Bess took her out of the room into the hall, which had crisp pale walls and a window at the end of the corridor behind them, flooding the space with brilliant day light.

Turning right at the end of the corridor, they descended a double-wide stairway with a grand gothic banister. At the bottom was a large, square hallway. Various doors led away from it, and Devon waited for Bess to direct her.

Going through one of those doors, they carried on along another internal hallway. At the end were double doors that took them into a massive triple-story space. An even more immense gothic stairway was central. High above was a vaulted ceiling, and Devon had to stop and gaze upward at the breath-taking sight.

“This is incredible.”

The massive pointed arch door to her right had ornate stonework around it. Above it were many skinny arched windows which filled the cavernous foyer with rays of light that shot out in stripes, highlighting the stairs. Around the perimeter of the room were carved stone arches shielding open corridors where there were further doors.

“You like the architecture?” Bess grinned.

“It’s beautiful.”

“Let’s get to the dining room.”

Bess took Devon’s arm and began to lead her away, but she couldn’t stop gaping at the ceiling. Bess laughed as she pulled her under an arch and into another room. This one had a long table in the middle, which was covered with food. But Devon ignored the food and ran to the double window inset in another large stone gothic archway. The small panes of glass were different textures, and that made it impossible for her to get a wide view which frustrated her.

“Come and eat,” Bess said, filling a plate, which she put at one of the chairs then pulled out the seat. “Come on, come and sit.”

Giving up at the window, Devon went to the table and began to pick at the food while Bess filled her own plate. Except the woman didn’t sit with it, she put the plate at one place and then went to work filling a third plate.

Touching the edge of her plate, such an amount of food was a wonder. “What’s the special occasion?” Devon asked. “Why am I allowed out now?”

“Eat and enjoy,” Bess said. “The boys will be along once they’ve finished arguing.”

Devon was startled. “The boys? The buyer, came to me last night saying I’d meet new people today. Is that what this is about? Are they here?”

“Yes,” Bess said, putting the plate at the head of the table then retrieving another to put some food on it.

A door at the end of the room opened and Devon stopped picking at her food to watch Wren come in, but he was alone.

“Settle your differences?” Bess asked, sitting beside Devon.

“Do we ever?” Wren asked, striding across the room to sit opposite Bess. “He’ll be along in a minute.”

A stranger in this house, Devon was trying to get her bearings. “Will someone talk to me?” she asked. “Will I be allowed to go home today?”

“Usually after my assessment we decide how long a girl will need to recover,” Wren said, digging in to his food. “Then before we send her home we give her the lecture.”

“The lecture?” Devon asked.

“About what she should tell police about her ordeal and about us. We impress upon her how important our anonymity is.”

“So I’m getting the lecture today?” Devon asked.

“You’re not getting the lecture,” Bess said. “The boys think you might have some valuable information.”

“We’re going to ease her into it, Mom. Don’t just lay it on her like that.”

Another surprise. “Mom?” Devon asked.

So Bess was Wren’s mother. Could she be the mother of both men she’d met?

“Well done,” Bess laughed. “Anonymity is important, we don’t give out last names or relationships, and now you’re one for two.”

The door at the head of the room opened, and this time a familiar stranger entered. Tall like the silhouette she’d seen last night, Devon assumed this was the man who had visited her. Although she hadn’t picked out the specifics of his features last night in the dark, he carried the same air around him.

This had to be the other man Bess had referred to, the one Wren bickered with. Devon presumed their party was complete. Except the stranger who’d just come in waited at the door, and she didn’t have to ask why when a smiling woman emerged.

The woman’s sleek, black hair was loose around her narrow shoulders, and she seemed to effervesce with zeal. As the male stranger closed the door, the female one came to the table.

“Devon,” the woman said, coming over to sit beside her. “It’s wonderful to meet you.”

Glancing back at Bess, Devon wasn’t surprised to see her smiling, just as Wren was too. “You have Swallow here to thank for your liberation,” Bess said. “The woman can get the boys to do just about anything, you’ve never seen anything like it.”

“She’s the demi-chief,” Wren said and took a big bite from his sandwich.

The male stranger came over and sat at the head of the table. Swallow left Devon’s side to go to his. And instead of being enlightened, she was more confused.

“He’s the man who came to me last night?” Devon said, preferring to direct her question at Swallow.

“Yes, skulking around in the dark, freaking women out, is his specialty,” Swallow said, standing up to assemble some food on a plate. “This is Raven.”

“Raven?” Devon asked. “So you’re Swallow, he’s Raven, he’s Wren... you guys have a thing for birds?”

Bess was the one to answer. “Like we said before it’s protection.” The kind woman reached over to pat her hand.

“You’re not a bird,” Devon said to her.

“No,” Bess said with a smile and a shake of her head. “They tried to give me one of their codenames, but it never sticks. I’m not out there. I’m here. I’m safe. I feel silly when they try to include me as Kindred. I’m just here to look after them, that’s all.”

“Kindred?” Devon asked, looking at all the faces again.

“Way to go, Mom,” Wren said. “Guess I know where I get my loose tongue from.”

Swallow picked up a cherry tomato and popped it between her lips. “Mom?” Swallow said. “You guys weren’t this open when I joined the team.”

“How did she find that out?” Raven asked, his tone cold and irritated as he fixated on the doctor.

“It just slipped out,” Wren said. “We don’t usually have the Liberated down here.”

So she wasn’t the first. “The Liberated” that suggested that there had been others before her, just like they’d said. “You rescue women?” Devon asked. “Like me, you go in and buy them from these men and then bring them back here to patch them up?”

Looking from one face to the next, she expected an answer from Bess. But Bess was looking at Wren, who fixated on his plate until he glanced up to look at Raven, who definitely had more authority than the others in the room. Except Raven was more interested in the woman at his side.

“Answer her question,” Swallow said. “You can’t expect her to tell us what we want to know if we’re not willing to be honest with her... our professional relationship got much easier after I knew who you were, didn’t it?”

“Easier? We f****d before you knew who I was,” Raven said. “Doesn’t get much easier than that.”

Swallow hit his shoulder, but he picked up another tomato, bit it in two and slid the extra half between Swallow’s lips. Their intense eye contact made Devon blush and avert her eyes to Bess’s end of the table.

“Swallow is the best thing that ever happened to the team,” Bess said, and the normally happy woman was positively overjoyed.

Swallow seemed normal, she was beautiful, sophisticated in her own way. She sat straight and proud, managing to lean in to the man at her side without being obvious about their s****l connection. Their attraction was undeniable, it zipped between them even when they weren’t looking at each other.

Before in her room when Bess had insisted that the buyer wouldn’t come to her, Wren had said the buyer didn’t talk to Swallow. Bess had said only one person had his ear. Devon wondered now who that was. If Swallow had so much power that she could secure Devon’s liberation from that room, how could it be said that Raven didn’t speak to her?

“We know where the auctions happen,” Wren said. “We’ve spent a lot of years building up a network, we’re on the inside, we’ve made them believe that we want to buy these women for perverted reasons and they believe us.”

“They? You consort with these cartels?” Devon asked, disgusted by the idea. “The money that you give them, it fuels what they do.”

“We know,” Wren said. “And that’s why we go after them in other ways too. Each member of the Kindred has their own special skillset. Every penny that we give them is siphoned off somewhere else. We have a man who can access any computer system in the world and he’s drained more than one criminal’s bank account, believe me. We work hard to stay covert and—”

“Enough,” Raven said. “Stop running your mouth, Wren. She doesn’t need to know all the details.”

“She does,” Devon said but immediately shrank when Raven’s glare shot to her.

Formidable and oppressive, she was mentally impacted by his displeasure. With dark eyes and a darker demeanor, he grew as he became angry and his expression tightened. Swallow placed a hand over his and somehow that released the pressure and Devon watched him deflate, the anger seeping out of him.

“We have to be careful,” Swallow said to Devon while interlinking her fingers with Raven’s.

“I know, I’ve been given the spiel about protecting yourself and anonymity. But you all know who I am, you know my real name.”

They knew her first name at least, not her last, although Wren had said something which made her think they knew more than they were letting on. He’d referenced what was waiting for her back home like he actually knew.

Maybe her apartment had been rented out from under her, and she would be disappointed to lose her possessions, her sketches and her work. But more important to her was her brother. They didn’t see each other often, but he cared for her when she was in trouble and checked in on a regular basis to make sure she was OK.

If she had been under lock and key all this time, he would’ve noticed that she was gone. The problem with her big brother was, he was up to his eyeballs in his own messes. Going to the cops wouldn’t have been an option because he had no friends in the authorities. It was as likely they would blame him, find a way to contort the evidence to implicate him. At least, that would be his fear. Her brother had never met a cop that he trusted, and while he’d never been explicit about what he did or how he earned his money, she knew he was far from squeaky clean.

“To take them down, we need to know how they select their women. We need to know who’s in charge and how high up it goes. Did you hear any of these things?” Swallow asked.

“She is still weak,” Bess said. “You’re asking her to relive a horrific experience. We can’t ask too much of her too soon.”

“Maybe not, but we don’t have forever,” Raven said. “There will be another auction in a few weeks, and they’ll be collecting girls for it as we speak.”

It was starting all over again, like a cycle, and never had a single thought made her feel so sick. Right now, there were women walking from their homes to their cars, going from coffee shops to newsstands, feeling safe, oblivious to the fact that they were about to be abducted.

“Do you know how you were selected?” Swallow asked and Devon shook her head, not because she didn’t want to answer, but because reliving that moment of her life was too traumatic for her to face. “Can you tell us about your a*******n?”

Shaking her head faster, Devon pushed her chair from the table and stood up. “I just want to go home. Why won’t you let me go home?”

“You’re right,” Swallow said. “This is too soon. We’ll give her some more time.”

It was when Swallow stood that the men did too. “We have our own s**t—” Swallow touched three fingers to Raven’s lips to silence him and moved her body against his.

“It will keep,” Swallow murmured. “You made me a promise, come on. Time to pay up.”

Saying nothing else, the couple left the room hand-in-hand, and she wondered about the kind of woman Swallow was. As normal as she may seem, Swallow was with a man who bought women. Just imagining how he viewed them, the things he had to say and hear and see at those horrific auctions, it was difficult to imagine how any woman could lie down with a man after that.

“She’s protective of you,” Bess said, getting up and going over to clear Raven and Swallow’s places at the table.

“Protective?” Devon asked.

“Swallow is the heart of the couple,” Wren said. “Raven likes to take action, likes to be in control. But Swallow sees things from a perspective that he doesn’t. She’ll buy you the time you need, but you will have to tell us what we need to know eventually.”

Devon wasn’t sure she was ready to put all those pieces together. She wasn’t sure she could. Confronting her own a*******n wasn’t something she’d attempted, not even while she lived in her metal box.

Something began to beep and Wren stood up. He grabbed a phone from his pocket, made eye contact with Bess and then left the room.

Bess offered no explanation for his departure. “I hope you feel more comfortable, now that you know we’re here to help,” Bess said, taking the plates she’d gathered toward a door on the far side of the room. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, try to eat something.”

Being alone in such a vast space, Devon didn’t know what to do with herself for a few seconds and felt an initial surge of motivation to flee. Then she recalled what she’d been told last night, that they were on a private island. Even if she lost herself in this house, ran away from these people, and managed to get outside, she wouldn’t be able to get to freedom. Unless perhaps it was a lie.

Despite knowing she wouldn’t see much through it, she headed for the narrow window and lifted the latch. It only gave her a foot-wide view, and the space wasn’t large enough for her to climb out. But it was enough to confirm there was sea outside.

Assaulted by thick, salty air, it hit her skin, her mouth, her nose. The blessed sensation made her gasp in the natural aroma. The sound of the waves was loud, louder than she could’ve imagined having not heard anything while in her room. They crashed against the shore she hadn’t yet seen. A single gull called out, and a sound she may have once considered intrusive became part of a symphony of pure, natural reality. Eager to embrace this new environment, she leaned forward.

Opening her eyes as she pushed her head out the window, Devon couldn’t stop her grin from splitting her face. The sky was overcast, the thick, gray clouds mirrored an angry gray-blue sea that was rough and filled with scattered white horses. There may have been mists in the distance, but all she could see was the unbroken horizon, which revealed no blip of land.

From this position, she had a descending view toward a rocky outcrop that blended into a pebble beach that stretched to the end of her view where the land disappeared in a curve around the other side of the house. Pushing herself out further, she wanted to know how far she could see. The beach disappeared into a group of rocks in the distance. Still, she saw no land on the sea, no boats, no lighthouse or markers to suggest anyone was anywhere within rescuing distance.

It made sense for her to retreat back into the room to hide what she’d done by snooping out here. Opening this window had been a risk, looking outside was a risk. If Bess caught her, or Wren, or God-forbid, Raven, she could anger them and their kindness may only stretch so far.

But the salt in the sea air was too alluring for her to want to cut herself off from it again. She’d never realized what liberation was until this moment. It didn’t matter that she was confined in these walls, she would go back to stressing about that later. In this single moment, standing here in this place, breathing in this pure, pungent air, she realized liberation was a state of mind as well as a physical situation.

It was about spirit, it was about holding on, it was about knowing yourself and your strengths and believing that you would make it through, no matter what you faced. Devon didn’t want to give up this moment. She wanted to go out there, to sit on those rocks, and stare at that sea to remind herself that she was alive.

It couldn’t last forever and she didn’t want to be restricted from doing this again if she got the chance. So, she took hold of the latch and was about to close the window until, in the distance beneath her from behind the shielding window, a figure came into view from the direction opposite to the one she’d been staring in.

A man with jet black hair. He was running along a path cut in the windswept grass above the rocks and beach. Wearing a black tee shirt and shorts, he was fast, zipping along the shore like it was nothing. Despite the vast distance in front of him, he was not fazed, he kept going. His long legs cut down the distance with every sure stride.

He slowed. He was too far away for her to make out specific features, but she’d guess he had to be fit given the distance she’d seen him cover in such a short time. He stretched and she was transfixed. Even the gull and the sea became silent to her ears. Sight was her primary sense again.

He picked up his tee shirt to wipe his face, turning into the wind as he did, giving her a view of a tanned, toned torso that was more than just fit, it was sculpted. For a moment, she was inspired to adjust her artistic medium just for that perfect form.

Fearful that he may catch her staring, despite the distance between them, she pulled the window as closed as she could while still managing to peek out with one eye. He dropped his tee shirt and turned to the sea, pulling a handheld device of some kind from his back pocket. Standing where he was for a moment, he admired the stretch of water she’d been admiring before he came into her eye line. Now it was invisible to her because she was too busy trying to peer closer at this stranger’s muscular calves trained for exercise.

He began to work on the device and it took all of his attention. Wandering from the trodden path, he moved to the rock edge and she held her breath because for half a second she feared he might keep going as he was too engrossed in his device to be paying close attention to what his feet were doing. His hair was long enough for a woman to tunnel her fingers through and it was beaten by the wind, telling her that that position, so near to such a precarious edge, couldn’t be safe. But he stayed there, right at the precipice, working on his device.

Who was he? Why was he here? Was it possible that they weren’t on a private island at all and he was just a citizen? Should she call out and beg for freedom? Except this house was clearly vast, Bess had brought her from one side to the other and Devon was already lost. She would never be able to find her way back the way they’d come. She probably wouldn’t even be able to find the grand entryway that still distracted her thoughts.

The whole building was amazing and her fingers itched to embrace its lines, curves, and angles and to commit those sleek shapes to paper with her delicate lead. But right now, her artist’s eye was focused on something else, a solitary figure, on a wild shore. Alone. Like she craved to be.

She wanted to know more of who he was. Even if she was to call out, the wind would carry her voice away from him and may take it to the ears of those who kept her captive. Maybe he was an employee here, someone who tended the grounds, if there were any. Or maybe there was more going on here than she’d been led to believe and these people didn’t trust her as much as they were trying to convince her they did.

Before Devon was ready to bid farewell to her view, he put the device back in his pocket and took a few backward steps to return to his path, then he was running again. His legs moved slowly in long, easy strides, and then he was gone, out of view. He disappeared around the farthest corner she could see and once again, she was desolate.